The Last Pilgrim

by Gard Sveen

  “She’s been locked up again; they came and got her on Sunday. Lay there screaming all day, so finally I called the medics.”

  “Where’d they take her?” Bergmann asked.

  “I don’t know where they take people like that. It’s unbelievable that they let her live here, really. Everybody’s afraid of her. I know this place is a dump, but I don’t want a neighbor sticking a knife in my back.”

  “What do you mean?” Bergmann said and thought, Knife in my back.

  “When she moved in about ten years ago, a friend of mine said she’d killed her stepfather with a knife years ago.”

  Bergmann felt a chill.

  Everything came crashing down inside his head in a second. The asterisk in the agency records. The profile of the perp. Acute psychosis.

  Vera Holt had apparently killed before, and, if his theory was correct, she had a motive for killing Krogh. Had Vera killed Krogh to avenge her father? Because she’d found out that Krogh had murdered him? But how could she know that Krogh had ordered her father killed?

  Bergmann ran down the stairs and out into the fresh air. As soon as he got in his car, he called Fredrik Reuter.

  “I found Vera Holt.”

  “Vera Holt?”

  “Kaj Holt’s daughter is still alive. She’s in some hospital psych ward.”

  Silence on the other end of the line.

  “Are you sure?” Reuter asked. “Do you really think she might be involved? Damn, that would be weird. I was thinking about it earlier today. We may have been on the wrong track. The shoe print we’ve got is an ECCO size forty-one. Most likely a man—”

  “But it could just as well be a woman,” Bergmann said, finishing his sentence for him.

  “Are you sure?” Reuter asked. “Do you think it’s her?”

  “She has a motive, at least. If my theory is right.” He grabbed his notebook and feverishly leafed through it backward. Where had he gotten sidetracked? Bente Bull-Krogh might have delivered the killer right into his arms days ago.

  “What is it?” said Reuter.

  “A woman. Krogh’s wife thought it was a woman.” He found the page from his first interview with Bente, when they had sat out on the terrace in Bygdøy and he’d asked her if her father’d had an affair with another woman.

  Bergmann studied his own handwriting for a few seconds. Wife thought a woman had phoned Krogh. An affair? His mistress’s husband? Began in 1963, lasted for a few years. Father stopped going hunting.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” said Reuter.

  “One time, years ago, somebody phoned and didn’t say a word. Krogh’s wife thought it was a woman. It was in the fall. During hunting season.”

  “Hunting for what?”

  “Grouse.”

  “September, then,” said Reuter.

  “It was September when Agnes, Cecilia, and the maid were killed.”

  “That was . . . what year was that?”

  “1963,” Bergmann said. “It went on for a few years. Then Krogh stopped going grouse hunting.”

  “How old was Vera Holt in 1963?”

  “Eighteen,” said Bergmann.

  “My God. Do you really think it could be Vera Holt?”

  “You’ll have to get her prints. And find her record.”

  “Record?”

  “According to her neighbor, Vera murdered her stepfather with a knife when she was young. Kaj Holt’s wife must have remarried, and then Vera eventually killed the man. There’s an asterisk in the agency records, which means there’s a file on her in the stored archives. It must be the old murder case.”

  Bergmann could imagine Reuter’s chin dropping to his shirt collar.

  “Do you realize what you’re saying?” said Reuter. “Krogh was murdered with a knife.”

  “Find her.”

  “You’re going to have to skip Berlin,” Reuter said. “Vera Holt may have killed Krogh. You understand what I’m telling you?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re not going to Berlin. Do you hear me, Tommy? You have to come down here right away.”

  Bergmann turned on the blue light on the car’s roof and moved into the left lane. He was going almost a hundred miles an hour.

  “No,” he said. “I can’t skip Berlin.”

  “You can’t? Why not?”

  “If Vera Holt was admitted to the acute psych ward, she won’t get out for at least a week,” Bergmann said.

  He heard Reuter sigh in resignation.

  Bergmann flicked on the siren to warn a hapless driver who hadn’t noticed he was coming up fast, much too fast. He could almost feel the heat from the disc brakes as he reluctantly slowed down. At last the car in front pulled over and let him pass.

  “There’s just one thing that I haven’t figured out,” Bergmann said. “How would Vera Holt know who ordered her father killed?”

  “How about Peter Waldhorst?” Reuter suggested.

  CHAPTER 47

  Thursday, June 19, 2003

  Hotel InterContinental

  Budapester Strasse

  Berlin, Germany

  An intense whistling sound slowly roused Tommy Bergmann from sleep.

  He recognized the sound of a truck backing down the street. He pulled up the covers and turned over to escape the strip of light coming through the curtains. When the truck stopped backing up and the soothing hum of Budapester Strasse had returned, his cell phone started ringing on the nightstand. Bergmann swore and reached for the clock. Already ten. He must have slept through his alarm. Or he’d never set it. Images from the night before flickered through his mind. He’d taken a walk along Kurfürstendamm, seen the famous ruined church, and bought some beer at a kiosk. He hadn’t wanted to see anyone, and had fallen asleep with his clothes on.

  Bergmann studied the display on his cell phone closely. Hadja had called him the night before, but he hadn’t picked up. He didn’t know what to say to her. She might be just what he needed, but he was afraid of hurting her, of pulling her down with him, the way he’d almost done with Hege. He let the phone ring and go to voice mail, and waited for Fredrik Reuter to call again. It only took a few seconds. All of a sudden Bergmann remembered his dream from last night, a terrifying, inhuman dream that haunted him several times a year.

  “And how are we doing today?” Reuter asked.

  Bergmann didn’t feel like replying.

  “Have you found Vera Holt?” he said, his head still half under the big pillow.

  “Ullevål. The acute psychiatric ward is quite nice. Not that I’d want to end up there, but . . .”

  “And?”

  “And she’s not in any condition to be interviewed. According to the doctor she’s working her way out of a psychosis.”

  “And the search?”

  “We’ll have a warrant by tomorrow morning. Maybe even this afternoon, if we’re lucky.”

  “What day of the week did Our Lord create lawyers?” Bergmann asked.

  “Democracy is never perfect, isn’t that how the saying goes?” Reuter said.

  Oh, shut up, Bergmann thought. The hotel room was full of the sort of ambient background noise that only a city the size of Berlin could produce. His gaze wandered around the room and ended up on the rotating TV, which was folded into the wall by the bathtub, making it possible to watch TV from the tub behind Plexiglas.

  “Don’t go into the apartment without me,” Bergmann said. “Wait till I get there.”

  “Okay. But we might have her, Tommy. I’ve got her file in front of me right now.”

  Bergmann felt his pulse quicken.

  “She was fourteen when she killed her stepfather.”

  Bergmann didn’t say a word, but flipped open the top of a twenty-pack of Prince cigarettes from the duty-free store. He hardly recognized himself in the mirror. His hair was greasy and unwashed, and his eyes had dark smudges underneath.

  “On the night of Advent Sunday, November 29, 1959, Vera Holt murdered her stepfather wit
h nine stab wounds in an apartment on Normannsgate. A patrol apprehended her on the steps of Kampen Church. Vera was sitting there with a bloody kitchen knife in her hand, wearing only her nightgown.”

  Bergmann lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. He thought about Vera Holt, a mere girl, in her nightgown, barefoot, with a kitchen knife in her hand. What god had created that life? he wondered.

  “She was judged to be temporarily insane at the time of the murder and not criminally responsible, though she easily could have landed in Bredtveit women’s prison at the age of fourteen.”

  “So what happened?”

  “She was at Dikemark psychiatric hospital for a few years.”

  “A few years?”

  “Good behavior, was declared cured, or so they said.”

  “When?”

  “1963.”

  “1963,” Bergmann repeated, stubbing out his cigarette before heading into the bathroom.

  “This could be our woman, Tommy.”

  “Wasn’t she given a clean bill of health?”

  “If a person is psychotic . . . you know this, Tommy. Think how many of them you’ve brought in—driven to the emergency room yourself—and then run into them again in the same condition a few months later.”

  “Don’t touch the apartment,” Bergmann said.

  The shower felt like a small cleansing. As soon as he got out, the sound of the TV—a German news program—reminded him what awaited him.

  The Turkish cab driver drove slowly up Kurfürstendamm. Bergmann sat with his arm halfway out the window, enjoying a gentle breeze on his bare skin. He’d never been to Berlin before, but he liked it—the old apartment buildings with their central courtyards, the endless green-edged boulevards. Though he had no real basis for his opinion, it seemed as if the city had shaken off the indignities of the war. In all the pictures he’d seen of Berlin over the years, it had looked dilapidated and half in ruins. Now something new and unprecedented seemed to be rising from the ashes. He felt a pang of fear at the thought that the Germans might one day rise again.

  Forget it, he thought as the cab stopped at a traffic light by the department store KaDeWe. He glanced at the clothes he had on and thought that maybe he ought to look a bit more presentable when he met with Waldhorst. A former German officer probably wouldn’t have much respect for a long-haired Norwegian policeman dressed in worn jeans and a pair of deck shoes that had seen better days. He touched the new light-blue shirt he’d purchased at Oslo Airport the day before and decided it was businesslike enough. He shook his head in resignation—he usually didn’t think like this. He was nervous about what Peter Waldhorst would have to say. He leaned back in his seat, noting the smell of new leather coming from the neck rest. An old German cabaret song issued softly from the loudspeaker in the door. Bergmann squinted at the sunshine and the dappled light coming through the trees.

  Peter Waldhorst’s house looked more like a small palace than a residence. Bergmann kept an eye on the pale brown villa as he paid the driver with a twenty-euro bill and asked for a receipt and five euros back. The gable wall faced the street behind a high wrought-iron fence covered in ivy. As the cab drove off he stood on the sidewalk and watched it vanish toward the city center. As he looked around, he realized that Waldhorst’s house was less ostentatious than the others in the neighborhood.

  He tried the handle of the gate. Locked. It occurred to him that Vera Holt might have stood there too. How else could she have found out that Krogh was responsible for her father’s death?

  Bergmann found the doorbell next to the wrought-iron gate. After quite a long time a woman’s voice answered.

  “Bergmann here. I have an—” He was interrupted by a buzzing sound from the lock in the gate.

  On the stairs he turned to look around. What a place, he thought. Hard to believe that it wasn’t bombed during the war, but it must be true. The neighborhood was filled with the grandest patrician villas he’d ever seen, tucked away behind old gardens and shielded by trees so tall that it seemed they wouldn’t stop until they reached the sky.

  A young girl appeared in the doorway. Bergmann assumed that she was Turkish.

  “He isn’t home. But he is expecting you.”

  She showed him into the huge dark hall.

  “When will he be back?”

  “Soon,” she said.

  Bergmann was led across the ground floor out to the terrace, where the maid suggested he could wait. He’d expected the interior to be furnished in an old, heavy style, but with the exception of the dark parquet flooring, the rooms were bright.

  The Turkish girl brought him coffee on a silver tray. When she saw that he had lit a cigarette, she came hurrying back with a crystal ashtray. Something was tugging at Bergmann’s mind as he sat gazing at the shining lake below the garden.

  The sun was scorching, even under the big umbrella, but he didn’t let it bother him. He looked at his watch and then went to open the door leading into the house. For a moment he simply took pleasure in the cool air inside. Then he examined the room more closely. There was a dining table with space for twelve at one end, a sitting area at the other, a couple of sideboards, some modern bar furniture, and a couple of modernist oil paintings on the walls.

  There’s something not quite right here, he thought, something in these rooms. He walked over to the other end of the room and opened the double doors. He found a dimly lit room dominated by heavy leather furniture. Bookcases with glass doors lined one wall, separated by a liquor cabinet.

  There, Bergmann thought when he saw the photographs on the liquor cabinet. A glimmer of light hovered over the room, and thousands of dust motes danced in the dim rays entering the room from outside.

  One by one Bergmann picked up the almost identical silver frames that stood on the polished mahogany cabinet. He recognized people who had similar features to Waldhorst in the photos, most of which were black and white, but none of the pictures showed Waldhorst himself. Of the twenty frames he figured that three of the faces were his children, the rest grandchildren. Most of the old color photos looked like they dated back to the sixties and seventies. A small silver frame held a photo of a German soldier. Bergmann guessed that he was a brother. A mere boy in a black uniform, with stern eyes but a soft expression. Bergmann set it down in the very back, where he’d found it.

  He took a step back and reexamined the only photograph that really interested him. It was a black-and-white photo of a young man and a very pregnant woman sitting on a flat rock, somewhere in northern Europe, perhaps even Norway. They were both smiling at the camera. The man, whom Bergmann had a vague sense of having seen somewhere before, had his arm around the woman, who held a cigarette in her hand. He didn’t recognize her—but wasn’t there something familiar about the shape of her mouth?

  No, this man . . . it was on the tip of his tongue.

  “Herr Bergmann,” said a voice to his left.

  A rather short, stocky man stood in the doorway to the hall, dressed all in white: tennis shirt, shorts, tennis shoes. His gray hair was combed straight back, and there were a couple of streaks of dried sweat on his face. Though he was older now, with a slightly stooped posture, Bergmann had no trouble recognizing him. He had the same bushy eyebrows, with eyes set a little too deep and close together for him to be called handsome. Unlike Carl Oscar Krogh.

  “Herr Waldhorst,” said Bergmann, moving toward him.

  He felt his cheeks flush when he discovered that he was still holding the photograph in his hand. Without releasing the man’s gaze he put it back.

  The man in the doorway smiled, as if to suggest that Bergmann was welcome to snoop around as much as he liked.

  Although his hand was sinewy—almost bony and full of liver spots—his handshake was the firmest Bergmann had experienced in a long time. Waldhorst looked him straight in the eye and said in his remarkably clear Norwegian, “Yes, Herr Bergmann, I am Peter Waldhorst.”

  Something doesn’t seem right here, Bergmann thought. Wha
t is it?

  CHAPTER 48

  Monday, September 14, 1942

  Villa Lande

  Tuengen Allé

  Oslo, Norway

  Agnes Gerner sat down in the window seat in Cecilia’s room. The little girl was sitting at her desk reading a book. She liked having Agnes nearby. Once in a while she would look up at the photo of her mother and murmur a few words. Agnes was momentarily seized with guilt at fooling the child into believing there was a future for them. She turned away from Cecilia and rested her forehead against the cold windowpane. A glimpse of early autumn sunshine penetrated the heavy cloud cover. A strip of light passed over the terrace before the clouds moved in once again. It seemed like another lifetime, that evening only a few months ago when she had sat on the terrace with Peter Waldhorst. Could it really be as simple as the Pilgrim had claimed, that Waldhorst was merely in love with her? Both Number 1 and the Pilgrim seemed to have settled on that idea, but she couldn’t make herself believe it. Maybe he was just trying to trick her into making some fatal mistake. But if they were right, someone else in Gustav Lande’s circle must be keeping an eye on her. Someone must be that notorious and cursed fox that Archibald Lafton had warned her about, the apparently dead beast that was waiting and waiting until she was positive it was dead before rising up and ripping out her throat. If it wasn’t Waldhorst—if he was simply in love with her as they claimed—who else did she need to watch out for? She’d considered every individual she’d met through Gustav, and she didn’t suspect any of them—except those wearing German uniforms, of course.

  But what if Number 1 and the Pilgrim were right? What if Detective Inspector Hauptsturmführer Waldhorst was nothing more than an ordinary man—with flaws and weaknesses—who had fallen in love with her? On the one hand, that might be good news, but it didn’t make things any easier for her. She was now in so deep that she hardly dared think about how she was going to get out alive. And the nausea was still plaguing her. She put her hand on her stomach. There was nothing left inside to throw up.